Suffolk Takes a Gamble to Revive Shellfish

By JOHN RATHER

Published: June 5, 2005

TWENTY years after brown-tide algae all but wiped out the Peconic Bay scallop fishery, and 10 years after the last major appearance of brown tide in the bay, Suffolk County is about to embark on a two-pronged program to restore shellfishing in Peconic Bay and Gardiners Bay.

Important steps are being taken now, but it will probably take five years or more to know whether the effort is working.

One major part of the program involves large-scale seeding of the bays with a new population of native scallops. The other involves leasing large tracts of bay bottom to private aquaculture companies for raising scallops, clams and oysters.

Officials acknowledge that the seeding program is a gamble, but they say it is one based both on thorough scientific research and on bay smarts. Paid for by the county, the program will densely plant selected areas of the bay bottom with millions of juvenile scallops.

''The idea is to have a high enough concentration of scallops,'' said Dr. Stephen T. Tettelbach, a professor of marine science and biology at Long Island University who has studied the East End bays for 20 years. ''They have to be close together, or the eggs won't get fertilized.''

Orient Harbor will be an initial site for the scallop seeding effort, Dr. Tettelbach said, because researchers believe that bottom conditions there are favorable.

The juvenile scallops, called bugs, were spawned from native brood stock in May at two hatcheries in the Suffolk County Marine Environmental Learning Center in Southold, the center of the county's initiative. In all, 6 million to 11 million scallops are to be planted each season over the next four years at a cost of $1.75 million.

Dr. Tettelbach said the seed scallops have a genetic marker that will allow scientists to trace the parentage of future generations of wild scallops.

Meanwhile, a change in state law last year gave Suffolk authority to supervise the leasing of 110,000 acres of state-owned underwater land, encompassing most of the bottoms of Peconic Bay and Gardiners Bay. The county has until 2010 to set up a leasing plan, but County Executive Steve Levy said Suffolk wanted to jump on the opportunity quickly.

He said there appeared to be substantial interest among aquaculturists. Both he and Michael Deering, the county's director of environmental affairs, said they did not expect the leases to lead to any restrictions on boaters using the bay.

The leasing program would be confined to shellfishing, and would not involve fish farms. There are currently no fish farms in the two bays, but a number of shellfish operations are already working private tracts that dot the bay bottoms. The lease program would not include areas seeded by the county or identified as good wild-scallop habitat.

An advisory committee the county created in April will meet this month to begin work on the specifics of the leasing plan. The committee includes aquaculturists, baymen, scientists and public officials.

Long Island was once a major center of shellfishing, supplying 28 percent of the nation's scallop catch as recently as 1982, when 250 tons of scallops worth $1.8 million at dockside were taken from Peconic Bay and Gardiners Bay, according to county estimates.

Then in 1985 came the first big bloom of brown tide algae, whose cause is still the subject of scientific conjecture. It tinted the bay water brown and killed both the scallops and the eel grass beds where scallops thrive. By 1996, the total scallop harvest was barely 53 pounds, worth $400, according to the county, and the hundreds of people who once worked the bays had dwindled to a handful.

THE restoration efforts are bringing some of them back, according to Karen Rivara, the president of the East End Marine Farmers Association of Orient. ''A lot of people going into aquaculture are baymen,'' she said. ''Their chances of being successful are really good, because they know the waters and they are used to hard work.''

Mrs. Rivara heads the Aeros Cultured Oyster Company of Southold and has rights to 205 underwater acres off Shelter Island, acquired from private owners. Such rights are fairly scarce now, she said.

Mrs. Rivara's husband, Gregg Rivara, is an aquaculture specialist at the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County and the site director of the center in Southold where the seed scallops are being hatched. He said that techniques using racks and cages could work in waters now barren of shellfish. ''Just because you don't find naturally occurring shellfish in an area doesn't mean you can't farm shellfish there,'' he said.

Researchers say restoring shellfish would improve water quality in the bays, because shellfish naturally filter out large amounts of organic matter. Some researchers think their filtering could help ward off future brown tide blooms as well. A major bloom would ruin the restoration plans.

Kevin McAllister, the executive director of Peconic Baykeeper, a private group in Riverhead, said it was important to make sure that neither program imports parasites or diseases to the bay. ''There has to be a great deal of monitoring and testing when you are introducing shellfish stock from elsewhere,'' he said.

The state's Department of Environmental Conservation shut down a program in 2002 that was transferring hard clams from Raritan Bay, off southern Staten Island, to cleaner waters in Peconic Bay, because a parasitic disease called QPX was found in the clams. The department said on May 2 that the program could be restarted because the parasite, harmless to humans but fatal to clams, was no longer present.

The Nature Conservancy of Long Island is trying to revive clam beds on 13,000 bay-bottom acres it owns in Great South Bay, once the country's leading source of clams. In an effort like the county's scallop plan, the group has densely seeded selected bottom areas.

The first Suffolk seed scallops went into the waters of Flanders Bay at a ceremony last September at Indian Island County Park in Riverhead. Some of the bug scallops tossed into the water by Mr. Levy and other officials apparently survived: A shell measuring 2.25 inches from the hinge to the top, the minimum size for legal harvesting, recently turned up on the beach at Indian Island.

Photos: Gregg Rivara is overseeing an effort to hatch scallops that will be planted. (Photographs by Deirdre Brennan for The New York Times)